Bringing you the best of video games every day!!!

Typoman Bringing The Power Of Words to Wii U

There aren’t many times that I finish a demo for a game and just feel the need to talk about it. Today I played one of those games. Typoman, a game coming exclusively to the Wii U from Headup Games, is what I like to call a PPWAUAS (Puzzle platformer with a unique art style). The game is very dark in tone, similar to games like Limbo.

You play as a little man made out of letters. You traverse the world using the power of words to solve various environmental puzzles. Just what exactly is going on in the world is hard to determine as of yet. The demo didn’t really delve into the story, though you can tell that something bad has happened, or is currently happening.

Some of the puzzles that I ran across in the short, 10 minute demo included using letters hanging from the ceiling of a cave to stop a “rain” cloud from falling to “drain” the pond it had created. Another one had me using a random assortment of levels to stop a crushing machine from killing me. At one point the word heat turned into hate and then morphed into a monster that wanted to kill me. I had to get it to chase me until I could use something in the environment to rid myself of its pursuit.

That’s the best part of this game. You, yourself appear to be mostly helpless. You can attack anyone. You can’t jump on them to kill them. You can only run from them. You have to use the power of the word to do anything. It’s a nice twist on a familiar platforming style that changes the way you’re going to think about dealing with the environment. It will also test your skills at being able to manipulate words and change them into something that will help you.

From the few minutes I had with the game’s demo I was immediately hooked. It’s a concept that seems very interesting and I’m looking forward to seeing how the rest of the game plays out. Can the puzzles hold up over the course of a full game? I’m hoping so. It’s also really nice to have a game that’s coming exclusively to a Nintendo platform.

From now through June 22nd you can download the demo and try it out for yourself on Wii U.